Old Man Chandler: Notes on Early Retirement

First Publication Anywhere

I’ve been in remission from a rare form of cancer for over four years. A couple of weeks ago, it seemed as though it had returned. Initially dismaying, but ultimately unsurprising. The cancer in question has a 50% recurrence rate. The doctors told me this at the outset. And even if it doesn’t come back, they said, there’s a high probability that I’ll develop a different form of cancer from all the radiation they blasted through my body.

For some time now, my life has existed strictly within the terms of a high-risk loan, presided over by a ruthless, rapacious creditor. I have not resented this. I knew the parameters of the agreement when I signed the lease.

As I drove to my oncologist’s office in Arcadia to receive what I was certain would be confirmation of my darkest assumptions, an overwhelming peace came over me. I reflected on my life as Lana Del Rey’s “Swan Song” (I will remain committed to the melodrama until the bitter end) played softly from my stereo. The cigarette I was smoking tasted like finality. A tokenistic kindness from the firing squad.

I’ve had a full life, I realized. I’ve been sober since I was nineteen and received the innumerable rewards that come with that. So many things I’ve wanted to accomplish are in the rearview mirror. I’ve published eight books and had the sort of career that very few writers get to have these days. I experienced love in a way I thought was unavailable to me. The world has shown me beauty I never dared dream was possible.

I am ready to go.

I walked into my oncologist’s office with my shoulders back and my mind at ease.

Imagine my surprise, then, when she informed me it had been a false alarm. I am still in the clear. Not only that, but my health is in fact so good that I no longer need to get regular scans. An annual in-person checkup, she said, would more than suffice.

What does one do with that? When you’re so ready to die, only to find out that you’re probably going to be around for a good while longer, where do you go from there?

This week, I announced on social media that the book I’m currently writing will be my last. After that, you can still expect a short story here and maybe an essay there, but no more novels.

There has been an outpouring of dismay from readers. My DMs are a mess (if I haven’t responded to you, I will, just give me some time to get through them all). My phone has been blowing up with text messages for days.

This response has warmed even my cold, jaded heart. I am endlessly grateful for all of my readers, be they the casually curious ones who read Dead Inside after seeing someone light it ablaze on TikTok, or the fervently devout ones who follow me from book to book and tattoo my words on their bodies. When thousands of books are published each year, it is no small thing when someone takes time out of their life to read yours.

That being said, I’ve never written for anyone but myself. I don’t write to be published. I have zero investment in reviews or awards or even sales numbers.

I write to overcome misery. Each book has been borne from a very acute and specific kind of suffering. Not only that, but I have to submerge myself in the suffering for the book to take shape. I have to swim around it. Lather myself in it. The actual act of writing the book is my method of washing myself clean. It’s my way out of the darkness. But in order to leave a place, you have to go there, first.

I simply do not want to go there anymore.

Pain is inevitable, they say. Suffering, though...that’s optional. I’m not so naïve to think I’ll never experience pain again—I have a very low pain threshold, so I will in fact experience a heaping truckload of it. But suffering—or at least the specific suffering that’s required for me to write a novel—I’ve had enough of that.

This is not to say I’ll never write again. I might even write whole novels someday. In the past, I’ve written novels that didn’t come from suffering, but you haven’t read them. No one will ever read them. They are hollow and uninspired. Their words lack heft. It’s the suffering that gives my published books whatever vitality they might have.

So, yeah, maybe I’ll write some books sans-suffering at some point, but I have too much respect and admiration for my readers to publish some pale, dead drivel. There are writers out there who can write beautifully without putting themselves through the emotional wringer. I am not one of them. Being done with the emotional wringer, and thus cutting myself off from the source of my most potent inspiration, the only sensible thing to do is to retire.

Not quite yet, though. I think this book I’m writing now is my best, because the suffering from which it’s been birthed has been more intense than any before it. The woman who inspired it made me happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Happier than I thought was possible. In turn, the termination of our relationship provided me access to a new kind of suffering. An unexplored abyss preceded by a precipitous fall from a height higher than the heavens themselves.

That fall, I imagine, is the secret ingredient that makes my current work-in-progress so much more biting than any of my novels which came before it. I’d been to hell before, but never to Heaven. The memory of the latter gives a whole new meaning to the former.

I’ve spent the last four months swimming in the icy depths of hell. I have drenched myself in its filthy, frozen waters. I have documented the sights and sensations there more fastidiously than I ever have before, because I do not intend to return.

This next novel will mark my final voyage aboard Charon’s infernal boat, back to the land of the living.

It will be a good one to go out on.